“Hi, everybody,” Mr. Obama says in the 30-second YouTube video posted Monday on his Facebook page. “I just want to take a minute to invite you to a town hall meeting on the economy that I’m holding at Facebook’s headquarters this Wednesday, April 20. It is going to be live-streamed, and I will answer questions from folks across the country.”
By Tuesday afternoon, more than 22,000 people had signed up.
It is all part of Mr. Obama’s re-election effort to use social media and other online tools to galvanize supporters. But unlike in the last presidential campaign, Republicans are better prepared to compete online in the 2012 contest.
“The notion that the Internet was owned by liberals, owned by the left in the wake of the Obama victory, has been proven false,” said Patrick Ruffini, a Republican political online strategist who is now advising the exploratory campaign of Tim Pawlenty, the former governor of Minnesota, after working as a digital adviser to President George W. Bush’s campaign in 2004 and later to the Republican National Committee.
During last year’s midterm elections, Republicans caught up with Democrats in using technology and social networks, and now many Republicans elected to the House and Senate are using these tools more than Democrats, according to several political and technology experts.
“This will be the first election in modern history that both parties are understanding the potential of the technology to change the results of the election,” said Andrew Rasiej, a co-founder of TechPresident.com, a blog that covers politics and technology, and a digital adviser to Democrats since Howard Dean’s presidential campaign in 2004. “Both Republicans and Democrats are ready to use online platforms and are no longer skeptical of its potential.”
What Republicans recognized after Senator John McCain’s bruising defeat in 2008 is that Mr. Obama’s digital strategy was deeply integrated into his real-world campaign. Mr. Obama’s team used its Web site, e-mails and text messages to do more than broadcast his campaign message. The tools made it easier for people to donate online, to volunteer for the field operation, particularly in caucus states, and to assume responsibility for other aspects of the campaign, like assembling groups of neighbors for a chat and creating the Obama ’08 iPhone app.
“You learn more from losing than winning sometimes,” said Matt Lira, who worked on the digital team for Mr. McCain’s presidential campaign and who is now director of new media for Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, the House Republican majority leader.
Mr. Lira said that House Republicans, meeting in January 2009, made a commitment to get into the digital game and moved aggressively during last year’s midterm elections to sign up members and potential candidates on Twitter and Facebook.
“You did not become a top recruit for the House unless you intended to make a robust use of the Web,” Mr. Lira said.
Sarah Palin, who started a brand-new Web site Tuesday with features that allow supporters to easily donate to her political action committee, has long had an established and robust presence on Twitter and Facebook, where she has almost 2.9 million fans. Other possible Republican presidential contenders in 2012, including Newt Gingrich, Representative Michele Bachmann and Mike Huckabee, use Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as well. Mitt Romney announced his exploratory committee last week with a video, an update on his Facebook page, which has almost 845,000 members, a Twitter post introducing the hashtag #mitt2012, and a new Web site.
Mr. Pawlenty introduced an innovative twist: a social gaming layer borrowed from Farmville and Foursquare that awards badges and points to supporters who participate more fully in the campaign. As an example, supporters get 10 points for connecting their Facebook account to the campaign’s Web site and 5 points for adding their Twitter account. If you post a message on your Facebook page or set up your own group, you get a badge.
Facebook, in particular, allows candidates to harvest valuable data. By getting permission from supporters to use their Facebook account to log in, campaigns can gain access, depending on a user’s privacy settings, to a supporter’s e-mail address, hometown and personal network. “The days of going to a Web site and signing up and waiting to hear back from a volunteer coordinator about how you can get involved are over,” Mr. Ruffini said.
None of the Republican or Democratic digital strategists are claiming that social media, mobile and other digital tools alone will win a campaign. While Facebook and other social media channels will undoubtedly be powerful tools for presidential contenders in 2012, voters can still expect a barrage of traditional television campaign advertising and direct mail.
“We look at the number of Facebook fans, Web visits, and it is not anywhere near the reach of television,” Mr. Ruffini said. “But things like the Facebook news feeds give us the ability to deliver information into average people’s feeds.”
Republican voters matched Democrats in their use of these tools, with 40 percent of Republican online users turning to social media to get politically involved in a campaign, compared to 38 percent of Democratic voters, according to a study by the Pew Research Center for the Internet and Society. Tea Party supporters were especially likely to use social media to connect with a political group or candidate.
“It is not necessarily that Democrats or young people or liberals have become less active,” said Aaron Smith, the author of the study. “It is more that older adults, conservative voters and Tea Party activists have come to join the party.”
Republican presidential contenders still face a formidable online foe in Mr. Obama. He announced his re-election campaign this month with an e-mail and text message blast, posts on Twitter, a short video on YouTube and a new app that connects supporters and their Facebook friends to his campaign Web site with a question, “Are you in?”
“We will use social media and the latest technology available to fuel the energy and commitment of folks on the ground, community by community, neighborhood by neighborhood, house to house, all around the country,” said Katie Hogan, a spokeswoman for Mr. Obama’s re-election campaign.
posted Apr 9th 2011 4:39PM 
Sony does what Nintendon't? That's the general sentiment from a brief interview that PlayStation chief Jack Tretton gave to Fortune this week, in which he talked up Sony's strengths and played down (some may even say belittled) its competitors, and Nintendo in particular. That began with the relatively tame assertion that Sony's decision to go high-end with PlayStation 3 is just now beginning to pay off while the other consoles are "starting to run out of steam," before he took aim at Nintendo's handheld business. According to Tretton, Nintendo's handhelds all offer what he calls a "Game Boy experience," something that's great as a "babysitting tool," but that "no self-respecting twenty-something is going to be sitting on an airplane with one of those." Yow. Any self-respecting twenty-somethings beg to differ? Let us know in the comments below. 
I have to start with the most obvious tool first. LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice and is bound to become the King of the Linux desktop office tools. This piece of software offers everything anyone needs from an office suite: Word Processor, Spreadsheet, Presentations, Database, Drawing tool, and Math Formula tool. LibreOffice also is one of the most versatile office suites, when it comes to inter-operation with other office suites (LibreOffice is compatible with all major office suites.) LibreOffice also offers a feature you won't find in the likes of MS Office -- extensions. With extensions you can extend the capabilities of this FOSS office suite well beyond the norm. A sample list of extensions include: PDF import, Report Builder, Non-linear Solver, Wiki Publisher, and more. Check out the LibrePlanet wiki for more extensions. Figure 1 shows the main LibreOffice interface, where each of the applications can be launched.
Some users will appreciate that Evolution also has (with the aid of an installable extension) the ability to connect to an Exchange server. Although this feature is still in heavy development, it does work and allows you near-Outlook functionality.
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